From Vente-Privée

I define myself as a scientist/engineer who enjoys modelling, characterizing, and optimizing complex systems and processes. I've an analytical approach and enjoy statistics, distributed systems, and data mining. I enjoy liberating constraints, hence I like restricted languages such as Haskell or SQL, and my book recommendation for software engineers is "The Design of Everyday Things". I'm a practitionner too, as I spent 2years as an SRE at Google in London in the DNS and web load balancing team. I'm now back in Paris and work at Vente-Privée, where I contribute to the redesign of some bits of complex supply chain processes.

We live in a time of changes. Functional programming (FP) is not widely known and has an image of being too be academic or being ill-suited for real-world systems. Myths have a thin bit of truth. Somehow, a number of ecosystem changes are now shaking things up.

On the one hand, technology improves, multi-core machines and multi-machines systems are common with the cloud. Algorithms and data-structures developped for FP are useful in these distributed environments.
On the other hand, FP languages gain maturity and reach new platforms such as the JVM, .Net and the web, which means that more real-world problems are within the range of functional programmers.

Java, C++ both got anonymous lambdas and optional types in the recent years. Meanwhile, Swift started with these features. Also, immutable infrastructure is taking up. These illustrative facts are not a coincidence, they tell that FP is a direction, and functional programmers are pulling the whole industry in their direction.

The Functional Programmers Paris Meetup gathers FP users and implementers and stresses the importance of cross-pollinisation between language-specific FP communities.